Everything but the thought counts in the endearingly cheesy Love Hurts
The Valentine's Day-themed romp has its heart in the wrong place, but it makes up for it with lots of silliness.
Photo: Universal Pictures
Those with long-term romantic partners have learned that, beyond the cheesy gifts of bears and candies and flowers, all a successful Valentine’s Day needs is thoughtfulness. They also learn that the bears and candies and flowers don’t hurt. Love Hurts, an action movie as committed to its holiday bit as a late-career Garry Marshall film, approaches its theme with a focus on the latter. There’s not a lot of thought here, but it’s the little things—the intensity with which the film wholeheartedly buys into its festive setting and taps into an almost Hallmark-level of silliness through that devotion—that endear you to Love Hurts beyond its tacky genre obligations.
From the producers of David Leitch-adjacent action movies like Nobody, Love Hurts presents another harmless suburbanite—this time Ke Huy Quan as the cloyingly cutesy realtor Marvin—who must give into the universe’s magnetic call to kick some ass. Quan does a broader version of the “harmless happy-go-lucky to pose-striking hero” routine from Everything Everywhere All At Once, discarding his plastered-on salesman’s smile when semi-threatening “Valentine’s Day cards” from his old acquaintance Rose (Ariana DeBose) start turning up. Oh, and when a guy named The Raven (Mustafa Shakir) crashes his office party and puts a knife through his hand.
Despite this party-crashing (and how thoroughly Shakir steals the show as an emo poet-assassin who dashes around in a Matrix trenchcoat), Love Hurts maintains enough work-life balance that—aside from the film’s best scene, inside a home Marvin is in the process of selling—the professional and personal rarely collide. Part of this is due to the film seeming to take place over just two days (despite this, everyone continues their Valentine’s shtick throughout the film; maybe it was on a weekend that year?), so there’s not quite enough time to develop stakes beyond “bad guys are here now, fight them.”
And for the most part, that does the job. The plot is as simple yet opaque as the message on a badly stamped candy heart: Marvin’s crime lord brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu) wants Rose dead, while ex-enforcer Marvin is responsible for her still drawing breath. From there, cash grabs and backstabs string together a series of fights and getaways. It’s a tangled web of underlings, bad voiceover, and emotional motivations that are, at best, icky. (DeBose doesn’t just choke on the scenery as Rose, but serves as a woefully miscast love interest for Quan.) But more enjoyably, the narrative is mostly an excuse to string together charming genre ephemera, like bickering henchmen and combat that collides with the cheery artifice of realty.